Re: What is your outlook?

Oh I’m an optimistic person. It’s like . . . I think there’s the . . . There’s a fundamental, spiritual choice. It’s not a fact choice. I think the facts can be . . . It’s like a giant . . . Reality is like a giant connect-the-dot game, you know? And so you know, you connect the dots when you were kids, and you did one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, and then you brought it to your parent. And if it was supposed to be a cat but you didn’t connect it right and somehow it became a duck, you don’t want your parents saying to you, “That’s stupid. It was supposed to be a cat; you made it a duck.” You wanted your parents to say, “Wow! That’s simply unbelievable. I don’t know if you got all the numbers in order, but you created an amazing new picture!” I’m an optimistic . . . Reality can be connected in a lot of different ways. I connect those dots towards optimism, towards hope, towards possibility. I don’t think naively. Life is hard. There is pain in life. There is suffering in life; but we have tremendous resiliency and tremendous capacity to transcend that and to make our lives and other lives better.
Recorded on: 8/15/07